The Carry Home

Shortly before her death, Jane Ferguson told her husband that, if she were to die before him, he should scatter her ashes in five wilderness locations that had been intimate parts of their life together. In this moving chronicle Gary Ferguson fulfills that promise. His act of “carry home” is told in tones of bereavement and celebration of their twenty-five years together in the natural world. His previous books, including Walking Down the Wild and Shouting at the Sky are in a more traditional mode of nature writing. This one is more personal and evocative of not only our connection to nature, but our connection to each other. “At first, the journeys broke my heart,” he writes. “Later they helped me to piece it together again.” Winner of the 2015 Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute’s Nature Writing Award.